The application generally relates to a system and method for compressive sensing (CS), or computational imaging, optical design. The application relates more specifically to software methods that enable the design and evaluation of computational imaging systems and compressive sensing imaging systems.
Design tools that enable exploration of CS system performance are lacking in the art. One possible reason for the lack of design tools may be the enormous computational resources required for designing a CS system. Generally, millions of ray paths must be computed and then repeated for thousands of different configurations to attain a single system transfer function which can be used to evaluate traditional optical system performance metrics. The disclosed methods and systems utilizes a graphics processing unit (GPU) based raytracing technique to parallelize the simulation process, enabling reasonable simulation times and tools closer to that of traditional optical design.
Existing computational or compressive imaging systems rely upon highly abstracted models of imaging components, and do not provide a computational/compressive imaging system transfer function of a realistic system. The proposed method relies upon non-sequential raytracing, and realistic models of imaging components. Our novel method captures realistic and complex behavior of both the optics and opto-mechanics.
Traditional optical design tools, e.g., OpticStudio software by Zemax, LLC of Kirkland, Wash., or FRED software, have been used to simulate the intermediate images produced by a computational or compressive imager. However, these design tools utilize CPU based raytracers, which can require seconds to produce a single usable image in the calibration data set. CPU based raytrace techniques are insufficient for optical system design applications such as optimization, genetic algorithms, or simulated annealing. Computational or compressive imaging systems can take thousands or tens of thousands of simulated calibration output images to enable robust solutions when solving for the system transfer function.
What is needed is a system and/or method for rapidly testing and evaluating optical designs of computational and compressive imaging sensing (CS) systems. The term compressive sensing (CS) is used interchangeably with computational imaging, for purposes of this disclosure.